Posts filed under 'Ripped from the Headlines'

Four years ago today, Chinese lawyer Han Bing revealed a shocking execution further to China’s shadowy trade in harvested organs, with a post on the microblogging service Weibo.

The Epoch Times translates this post — which was widely shared, but deleted within days — thus:

This morning witnessed a horrifying practice of execution. The Supreme Court this week contacted the Provincial High Court to re-examine a determined death penalty case. However, the Intermediate People’s Court had the prisoner promptly executed without notifying the relatives for a last farewell visit. The reason for the prompt execution was that the death penalty prisoner had ‘willingly’ signed an organ donation release. To ensure the quality of the organs, the execution was carried out at the hospital. These judges and doctors without conscience turn a hospital into a place of execution and a market for organ trading!

If there has been any subsequent public explication of the details about this event — the identity of the prisoner, the particulars of the transplant — I have not been able to locate it.

China today carried out the controversial execution of Jia Jinglong, a peasant who found a nail gun was his only avenue of redress.

Jia’s village home in the northern Hebei province was demolished three years ago at the order of a local Communist chief who subsequently balked the family of compensation. (They got a small apartment in a high-rise.)

Rapacious developers backed by the power of the state expropriating dwelling-places in an environment of weak legal protections make for one of the most deeply felt abuses in boomtime China, and it goes without saying that it’s a racket where the wealthy and powerful dip their beaks and the other 99% shift as they can and nurse futile grudges. According to the Associated Press, Jia’s village near the city of Shijiazhuang “is overwhelmed by a cacophony of drilling, pounding and jack-hammering coming from construction sites. More than a dozen cranes could be seen in the distance, adjacent to high-rise apartment towers still being built.” As if to add a literary flourish to the injury, Jia also lost the girl in the end as his fiancee, now deprived the prospective roof over her head, promptly called off the wedding.

“What he has experienced is what many are going through or will be going through,” Jia’s sister Jia Jingyuan told reporters. “Because my brother is part of this society’s underclass, he represents the lives of many ordinary people.”

That’s because Jia Jinglong didn’t allow his grudge to remain futile: he used a nail gun to murder the local party chief who wrecked his house and life. It is hardly the only time that a desperate common person has lashed back at the cruelties of state capitalism with the pleasurable self-destruction of personal violence.

While premeditated homicide with a power tool is surely your basic capital case in any jurisdiction keen on the death penalty, the story behind it brought most of China to Jia’s defense; even some state media editorialized for abating the sentence. That wasn’t only in a spirit of vicariously joining the man’s revenge: the severity of the law towards an ordinary citizen charged with slaying an official raised an obvious equal-treatment grievance when contrasted with the likes of the wife of disgraced party boss Bo Xilai, who had a British businessman assassinated but still dodged execution.

(In fairness to the People’s Republic, China has executed powerfulofficials and plutocrats in various other recent high-profile cases.)

Thanks to Twitter friends including @jewssf and @luimnea for tipping me this story.

This Khan aspired to far-reaching reforms that would modernize his marchlands kingdom and not for the last time an Afghan ruler found this programme stoked a furious resistance among tribal grandees. Kalakani, though derisively nicknamed Bacha Seqao (son of a water-carrier) was just such a grandee, having pivoted profitably from regular military orders to highway robbery.

When Khan’s forces had vacated Kabul to manage a Pashtun rebellion in the south — only the latest of numerous tribal risings that plagued the Khan years — Kalakani in late 1928 sprang a surprise Tajik rebellion from the north and marched on the unprotected capital.

Amanullah evacuated Kabul with a quickness, personally behind the wheel as he blazed his Rolls Royce ahead of Kalakani’s cavalry all the way to India and eventual exile in Europe.

Kalakani

But the “bandit king” soon found his own government strained by the same tensions that had elevated him. Pashtun rebels who used to chafe under a western-oriented king now chafed under a Tajik one — in fact, the only Tajik to rule Afghanistan in its modern history — and their fresh rebellion soon toppled Kalakani in his own turn. He was shot with his brother and their aides, contentedly telling his firing squad, “I have nothing to ask God, he has given me everything I desired. God has made me King.”

Kalakani is still the third-last king of Afghanistan and is still bitterly — violently — controversial on his native soil, where whether you reckon him a hero or a thug depends upon your kinship. Just weeks ago as we write this, a reburial of Kalakani’s remains in Afghanistan provoked bloody ethnic melees on the streets.

* Although there is no specific connection here to Habibullah Kalakani, an execution blog would be remiss not to include a reference to this sadly undateable National Geographic photo tracing to Khan’s reign of one of those real-life dangling man-cages so beloved of the sword-and-sandals fantasy genre. Per NatGeo’s caption, an actual thief was “put in this iron cage, raised to the top of the pole, so that his friends could not pass food or poison to him, and here he was left to die.”

Jeffrey Landrigan was executed in Arizona for murder on this date in 2010 — via an imprt drug that made his case a recent landmark in the ongoing U.S. tussle over lethal injection.

Landrigan broke out of jail in 1989 where he was serving a second-degree murder sentence and did a first-degree murder in the course of an armed robbery.

By the time this mundanely terrifying killer was ready to face his punishment, U.S. states were beginning to feel the pinch from anti-death penalty activists’ campaign to shut off the supply of a key drug in the lethal injection protocol — sodium thiopental.

Since the very first lethal injections, sodium thiopental has stood as the first of the standard three-drug cocktail: sodium thiopental to induce unconsciousness, pancurnium bromide to inflict muscle paralysis, and potassium chloride to stop the “patient’s” heart.

Sodium thiopental owed this juridical responsibility to its place as the Brand X medical anaesthetic thirty or forty years ago. But in the time since, that medical role has been overtaken by propofol, leaving sodium thiopental ever less frequently manufactured — and exposing a potential vulnerability in the executioner’s supply chain. Death penalty abolitionists targeted that weak point with effect, especially once the last U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, pharma giant Hospira, got out of the game.

Sodium thiopental expires, so states that intend to conduct lethal injection executions couldn’t really stockpile. Instead, they have two options:

Find a new source for sodium thiopental; or,

Find a new lethal injection procedure

In the past few years, those laboratories of democracy known as state legislatures have experimented promiscuously with re-jiggering the lethal injection to account for the inhospitable thiopental climate with the upshot that there no longer remains one standard lethal injection protocol, but multiple mutations innovated and cribbed state by state — and each mutation is liable to change again without warning in response to the next setback.

This ongoing drama has played out throughout the 2010s, but it so happened that Landrigan’s long road to death reached its end about where the scarce thiopental story began.

In Arizona’s case at the comparatively early date of 2010 — back when Hospira had already suspended domestic thiopental manufacture — the gap was filled by requisitioning the drug from an overseas supplier.

Easy enough, one might suppose: C11H17N2NaO2S is C11H17N2NaO2S no matter its brand label.

But it turns out that the production and the import of medical drugs are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, and neither Arizona nor the fly-by-night British pharmaceutical maker it contracted had bothered satisfying the paperwork requirements. Landrigan’s appellate lawyers fastened on this failure, arguing that the state’s calculated ignorance of its drug’s purity was inviting a painful botch.

Landrigan’s story and the larger lethal injection crisis into which it fits was the subject of the very first episode of the popular podcast More Perfect — whose beat is the U.S. Supreme Court.

That institution had a low moment in this drama interceding at the 11th hour to okay Landrigan’s execution after a Kafkaesque legal shell game in which Arizona repeatedly ignored lower courts’ orders to supply documentation about its proposed execution drug, then argued — and won the argument! — that the prisoner’s lawyers were only speculating that the drug might be impure or harmful and couldn’t prove any problem. Try that one out on your customs officer the next time you get pinched carrying contraband at the border. A Ninth Circuit Court judge punished bad faith with a stay of execution, but the high court reversed that stay on a 5-4 vote this very October 26, allowing Landrigan’s execution hours later.

“The state flatly stonewalled the lower courts by defying orders to produce information, and then was rewarded at the Supreme Court by winning its case on the basis that the defendant had not put forward enough evidence,” Hofstra law professor Eric Freedman lamented to the New York Times. “That is an outcome which turns simple justice upside-down and a victory that the state should be ashamed to have obtained.” It’s a line that mirrors the critique exasperated death penalty advocates have leveled against their foes for suing to block “cruel and unusual” executions on the back of drug supply kinks that they themselves engineered.

The messy resolution of Landrigan’s own case was very far from a solution to the underlying dilemma. In the years since, European manufacturers have themselves been squeezed out of the lethal injection supply chain by anti-death penalty pressure, while the states’ various adaptations have worked themselves out in a mess of litigation and human experimentation. It’s a story still being written — into the very flesh, sometimes, of men like Jeffrey Landrigan.

On this date in 1968, Indonesian Lance Corporal Harun Thohir and Sgt. Usman Janatin were hanged in Singapore for bombing the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank three years earlier.

Aptly, such confrontational behavior took place during the era of Konfrontasi, a running fight between Indonesia — feeling its oats as a regional power — and the British straits possessions that had just recently been amalgamated (to Indonesia’s irritation) into the new country Malaysia.

This wasn’t a “war” full of set-piece battles: think commando raids and jungle skirmishing instead. Initially confined to the island of Borneo of which Indonesia occupied three-quarters and coveted the remainder, the fight provocatively spilled to the “homeland” Malay Peninsula itself, including a number of saboteur bombings concentrated in Singapore — which was still a part of Malaysia in the early 1960s.

The most notorious and destructive of these was conducted on March 10, 1965, by our men Harun Thohir and Usman Janatir along with a third commando named Gani bin Arup. Tasked with bombing an electric station, they instead packed 12 kg of nitroglycerin into a bank — an iconic landmark that was at the time the tallest in its vicinity. The MacDonald House bombing killed three civilians and injured 133 more.

Gani bin Arup escaped successfully, but Janatin and Thohir suffered a motorboat breakdown and were apprehended. By the time their execution date arrived, a few things had changed: Singapore itself had been expelled from Malaysia to become an independent city-state; and, the Konfrontasi era had been dialed back with the deposition of Indonesian president Sukarno.

But the hanging still stayed on, and feelings ran understandably high for both the former antagonists.

The jurisdictional issue of most moment for the bombers was not the identity of the offended state, but their contention that they were regular armed forces members just following their orders and entitled to prisoner of war status. Jakarta was indignant at Singaporean courts’ dismissal of this angle; Singapore, well, it didn’t want to take a soft line on terrorists blowing up banks.

Headline in the Oct. 18, 1968 London Times, reporting “a crowd of 10,000 people who joined the procession to the war heroes’ cemetery here [Jakarta] carried banners proclaiming: ‘Declare total war on Singapore’, ‘Annihilate Singapore’, and ‘Hang Lee Kuan Yew‘.”

As is so often the case, one man’s terrorists are often another’s freedom fighters: the hanged marines remain tday official national heroes in Indonesia, and in 2014 the navy created a diplomatic incident with Singapore by christening a Bung Tomo-class corvette the KRI Usman-Harun.

On this date in 1914, the French army shot Lt. Jean-Julien Chapelant as a coward.

Most resources about Lt. Chapelant are in French, as are almost all the links in this post — but within France this case has been contested since the interwar years when his father fought in vain ferocity to reinstate the honor of his son.

Four days before his execution, Chapelant, commanding a machine gun section near a village in the Somme, was captured with four other gunners when the Germans overran their position. Though he’d been shot in the leg, Chapelant managed to escape his captors and return to French lines. (Three of the other gunners escaped, too.)

While the categorical rehabilitation of Great War soldiers “shot at dawn” as cowards or deserters has been a going concern in recent years, Chapelant also has a compelling individual argument that he ought not have been construed such even by the standards of his time.

The luckless lieutenant was shot for “capitulating in open country”. This was at best an extremely prejudicial interpretation of the facts, seemingly one that commanding officers themselves still adjusting to the unexpected prowess of German arms had already settled upon before any proper investigation, out of their pique at losing the position. The verdict was so certain that Chapelant’s commanding officer gave him his revolver back urging him to “burn out his own brains” and save everyone the trouble.

Chapelant refused, insisting that he had done his proper duty, and military justice was edified by the spectacle of a crippled man who could not stand propped up in his stretcher against an apple tree for the tender ministry of his firing squad.

“I die innocent. You will all know it later,” he told his executioners — then added, futile wish, “do not tell my parents.”

Although we have been treated in these pages to the heartbreaking scene of an officer comforting a man about to be shot with the remark that “yours also is a way of dying for France,” the idea has until very recently been confined to the precincts of personal sentiment and certainly not to the institutions responsible for the dying.

On November 11, 2012 — the centennary of Lt. Chapelant’s execution* — he was ceremonially rehabilitated and his death officially ascribed to that same cause that laid so many of his comrades low: “mort pour la France.”

On this date in 2012, northern Mali’s Islamist Ansar Dine movement, then in control of the city of Timbuktu, publicly executed Moussa Agh Mohammed there for murder.

Mohammed was one of Ansar Dine’s own fighters, but stringent consistency would oblige his fellows to put him to death under the sharia law Ansar Dine itself was enforcing in Timbuktu. Some days before he got into a fight with fishermen who reproached him for trampling their nets; as the confrontation escalated towards physical violence, Mohammed unslung his Kalashnikov and gunned one of them down. The fisherman’s family was offered, but refused, compensation in exchange for sparing the killer.

According to a correspondent, Mohammed “was a Tuareg cattle farmer from a major tribe [who] joined the Ansar Dine movement one month ago [before his execution]” having previously been affiliated with the Tuareg rebel army the National Movement for the Independence of Azawad. It was the third known execution in northern Mali under sharia: the previous two were an adulterous couple stoned to death in the town of Aguelhok.

“I didn’t feel a great deal of emotion from the crowd,” our observer reported. “People just stood there and watched as if it were a show. In contrast, the members of Ansar Dine looked moved by the event. Mohammed had close relationships with a number of his peers. But they explained that no one is exempt from Sharia law, and because of that they had no choice but kill him. It was a question of God’s will.”

On this date in 1972, Argentina’s junta authored the extrajudicial execution of 16 political prisoners after a jailbreak attempt.

Remembered as the Trelew Massacre (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish), it’s been back in the news for an Argentine court’s 2012 conviction of executioners Emilio Del Real, Luis Sosa and Carlos Marandino for crimes against humanity.

One week to the day before those 16 crimes, more than 100 captured guerrillas from both leftist and Peronist movements attempted a mass breakout from Rawson Prison. The plan was to rendezvous with some well-timed getaway drivers who would whisk everyone to the airport where a flight waited to carry them to Salvador Allende’s Chile, which was then still a year away from its own military coup.

Between drivers failing to turn up and others arriving late to the airstrip the operation was a logistical catastrophe. Six people actually managed to escape abroad;* nineteen others, having made it to the airport but missing the flight, salvaged what they could be summoning a press conference and surrendering without resistance. They hoped to protect themselves by putting their case into the public eye.

Navy Lt. Commander Luis Emilio Sosa took the would-be fugitives to a naval base near the port of Trelew — not back to Rawson.

In the early hours of the morning on August 22, all nineteen were awoken, lined up, and machine-gunned by a detachment commanded by Sosa and Lt. Roberto Bravo. Twelve died on the scene; the others were dumped in the infirmary where four more succumbed. It would be put about, as usual, that the murdered prisoners had been shot trying to escape but that story didn’t convince many people. From exile, Juan Peron decried it as “murder”; protests and guerrilla attacks occurred on the anniversary of the slaughter for the next several years.

* These escapees went on to various interesting — and often violent — fates in revolutionary Latin America. One of them, Enrique Gorriaran Merlo, would eventually help to assassinate exiled Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.

This morning, Iraq hanged 36 men in Nasiriyah prison for a 2014 sectarian massacre perpetrated by the emerging Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL).

After months’ gestation in the Syrian civil war, the Sunni ISIS in June 2014 burst out of its enclaves and in the course of a few jeep-racing weeks gobbled upper Mesopotamia. It publicly declared its border-straddling conquests the Caliphate on June 29, 2014.

Iraq’s army mostly melted away ahead of the onrushing threat that summer, abandoning weapons and fleeing while ISIS overran Mosul on June 10, then advanced another 200 km to snatch Saddam Hussein‘s birthplace of Tikrit the very next day.

On June 12, ISIS fighters proceeded out of Tikrit to the adjacent air academy Camp Speicher.* There they abducted only the Shia cadets, including about 400 from southern Iraq’s Shia Dhiqar province, and mass-executed an estimated 1,600 — atrocities they took pains to document in a nauseating propaganda video showing dazed and pleading youths trucked to a forlorn ditch where they are laid flat and fusilladed by the dozen, while others are shot from a gore-soaked pier into the Tigris. (The video is available here.)

“The executions of 36 convicted over the Speicher crime were carried out this morning in Nasiriyah prison. The governor of Dhiqar, Yahya al-Nasseri, and the justice minister, Haidar al-Zamili, were present to oversee the executions,” according to an Iraqi spokesman a few hours ago.

Vietnam on this date in 2013 made its first-ever use of lethal injection for the execution of Nguyen Anh Tuan. Anh Tuan robbed and murdered a woman in 2009.

The new execution method was scheduled to take effect July 1, 2011, fully replacing the firing squad, but had a delayed rollout.

As in its country of birth, America, the needle-and-gurney contraption was afflicted by by shortages of the killing drugs. The European Union’s unwillingness to permit import for use in capital punishment eventually led Vietnam to arrange for local production instead.